Monday, December 18, 2006

classical CD liner notes

Je suis le hack.

There are levels to writing that I will never be able to come close to. This is cheerfully accepted . There are no Mount Everests in these pages, no E=MC2, nay. Merely meat-and-potatoes observations by an average guy (quoting Stephen King) trying not to mess things up too badly.

To quote the poet thus againe:

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

Most scribblers, bloggers and local scribes surely recognize when they are outclassed when they read passages from Dickens or Tolstoy (or insert another name from the Gallery of Greats). But, one has to marvel at the writing style/level of liner notes of classical CDs. They have the unmistakable pungent air found frequently upon the bucolic fields of bovines, which we may regard in the vernacular as cow patties. In short, there may be nothing more useless than classical CD liner notes, except the equally trying-way-too-hard jer-no-lism of popular music magazines.

For example: (talking about Schumann's string quartets) "whose atmospheric qualitites managed to formulate the disquietude of the "poetic" as something new: not in the sense of heroic defiance, but in the-still subdued-forms of crumbling pathos."

Huh?

File this under: I'm a big boy now and gonna make mama real proud by writin' all these perty werds.

OR: Since this is serious music written by a dead European composer whose name is already on the roster of names we must revere, I must write something which sounds like saying something; which I'm not. Perhaps no one will realize this if I obfuscate (Nice, yes?) any meaning with verbal diarrhea.

The string quartet, like the liner note dude, was trying too hard. It ain't Beethoven man, let up on the gas pedal.
Crumbling pathos? Crumble some more feta on my salad, salad boy and snap to it!
To quote a great man:
Chop, chop, pussycat!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" -- Thelonious Monk

If writing about music were in any way adequate, we'd not need to listen. We need to listen.

cheers,

wthii

eclectic guy said...

a grand YES